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Fight and Flight

Kea, United Kingdom

I’m not an artist. In fact this is one of the only paintings I have done since childhood. I just picked up a brush and some cheap acrylics and this is what came out. At first I thought ”Hmmm that’s not bad… nice colours… vivid.” But then I started looking at it as if from the eyes of a psychiatrist…. and I began to loathe my hideous work of art… because what I saw was mental illness…torture… cortisol…adrenaline… rage boiling up from beneath a turbulent ocean…. unrest…. confusion and fear. I realised then that the setting sun, which I thought I had painted, was in fact my very UNsettling OCD. And the solitary bird on the far right is me… in a constant state of stress and avoidance…. trying to fly away…. desperate to be free of it. And then I did something that only in hindsight did I realise was just as telling as the painting itself. I framed it. I boxed myself in and immortalised it with a golden frame. Instead I should dig it out of my draw and throw it in the bin…. like I wish I could my intrusive thoughts and the invisible torment that boils below the surface of my facade..